While the top 1% of American households earn 20% of all the income today, say Lindert and Williamson, in 1774 the top 1% earned less than 4% of total income in New England and under 9% of total income in the 13 colonies as a whole.

The researchers also report that in 1751, Gov. James Glen of South Carolina estimated that 5,000 people, or 20% of his colony’s residents, had “plenty of the good things in Life, and spend at the rate of two Shillings a day” – or about 13.4 British pounds (roughly $21) in today’s money, according to this handy-dandy historical calculator.

Meanwhile, 5,000 people – the bottom 20% of society – “have a bare subsistence and spend about a Groat per day.” (A groat was four pennies, or the equivalent of approximately $3.50 in today’s money.) But the remaining 60%, according to the governor, were solidly middle class, earning between one-fourth and one-half the average income of the rich.

Even by 1805, roughly a dozen years after stocks began trading on Wall Street, the distribution of income was nowhere near as unequal as it is today, report Lindert and Williamson. And in the decades that led up to the revolution, “within any American colonial region, free citizens had more equal incomes than do today’s Americans.”

The extreme gap between rich and poor has widened sharply in recent decades, but it is remarkable to discover that the gap was far narrower even in the era that inspired the revolution.

If Occupy Wall Street accomplishes nothing else, it should at least send Americans back to their own history books.